2,000 miles around the Great Lakes — one step at a time

Loreen Niewenhuis, author and adventurer, looks over her hiking boots that have gone 1000 miles while at her home on Goguac Lake in Battle Creek, Michigan, April 1, 2013. Niewenhuis has hiked 1000 miles along the Great Lakes shorelines. (Andre J. Jackson/Detroit Free Press/MCT)

Loreen Niewenhuis, author and adventurer, stands with the 35-pound backpack she used on one of her 1,000-mile hikes along the Great Lakes. The scientist-turned-author has written two books about her two Great Lakes hiking experiences.

BATTLE CREEK, Mich. — First, she walked 1,019 miles around Lake Michigan. Then, she walked another 1,004 miles along the shorelines of all five Great Lakes.

What does Battle Creek's Loreen Niewenhuis have inside her that compels her to put one foot in front of the other?

"I'd rather do 20 miles on soft sand than 10 miles on the side of the road," she says. "There is something about being where water meets land. I feel very clicked-in there. I feel like I can go forever."

Maybe she has walked more than 2,000 miles in the last four years because she seeks God. Or fears death. Or is on a crazy exercise regimen. Or is on the lam from the FBI.

She laughs heartily. No to all of the above.

She's actually more like Forrest Gump, who one day just put on his shoes and decided to set off on a little run.

"Our older son had gone off to college. The nest was emptying. I'd gotten my" master of fine arts degree ... "But I felt I could stack up novels and not have an agent and be in my office writing novels forever," says Niewenhuis, 49. "So I thought, let me do something completely different and get out of my office."

So she put on her hiking boots. She got out the office.

Boy, did she ever.

Niewenhuis lives in a pleasant condo on Goguac Lake near downtown Battle Creek. The divorced mother of two sons, 20 and 23, trained as a research scientist in biology. In recent years, she's been a novelist and short-story writer. In her loft is her hiking gear (one pair of Keen boots have more than 700 miles on them). Nearby is a writing desk with a panoramic view of the water.

Her first trek in 2009 started at Navy Pier in Chicago and went around Lake Michigan counterclockwise. It was a shock. Beaches gave way to jetties, impassable barriers, busy roads. She saw trash. She sank in bogs. Walked around nuclear power plants. In rain, wind, cold,

She won't say how much the first trip cost, but it was "thousands" of dollars, she says. She also tried not to think of the whole 1,000 miles she was walking.

"You put in a day, and it's 15 miles, but day after day, it really stacks up."

She stayed in hotels or B&Bs near cities, and her one-person hammock tent in campgrounds and on remote beaches. Some food she packed in her 35-pound backpack, cooking meals with a camp stove.

The trek took 64 days.

When she finished, she wrote a book, "A 1,000-mile Walk on the Beach" (Crickhollow, $16.95), which earned her enough money to pay for her second trek last year. This time, she hiked Michigan's entire sunrise (Lake Huron and Lake St. Clair) coast in the Lower Peninsula, plus portions of the Upper Peninsula (Pictured Rocks, the Keweenaw); Lake Michigan (Sleeping Bear and the Leelanau), western Lake Erie (Port Clinton, Ohio, to Grosse Isle); and the northern shore of Lake Ontario from Toronto to Belleville, Ontario. She ended her trip at Niagara Falls.

Niewenhuis' second book comes out June 1, "A 1,000-Mile Great Lakes Walk" (Crickhollow, $16.95). With the proceeds, she hopes to finance a third trek she's planning — walking 1,000 miles on Michigan's islands.

You probably didn't notice a lone woman in her 40s walking from Downriver to Detroit last year on Easter Sunday, but that was Niewenhuis.

The only person she saw was a homeless man, who stared.

Then he shouted out, "Happy Easter!"

She hiked 80-90 percent of her treks alone. She never listened to an iPod. She just listened to nature and her own thoughts. Sometimes, she sensed more.

"I'm not a real spiritual person, so this wasn't a connection-with-God sort of thing, but something happened on the first hike," she says. "The exertion of hiking fell away, and it felt like the Earth was turning beneath me, like it was completely effortless, and I was completely alive in the moment."

Niewenhuis talks little about problems on her hikes. She doesn't recall anything too difficult or lonely. She remembers enjoying herself.

Talk to family members who accompanied her on short stretches of the trips, however, and they have a slightly different memory.

"If that first day we walked together from Mears to Pentwater had been the first day of my 1,000-mile trek, I would have gone home and found an easier project to undertake," remembers Leslie Shipley, Niewenhuis' sister, recalling wind, rain, wading streams with garbage bags over her boots and wandering through thick brush as she accompanied her sister for two days of hiking.

Niewenhuis' son, Lucas, 20, a student at the University of Michigan, hiked most of a 50-mile stretch of Lake Michigan with his mom. "Something like 40-mile-per-hour wind gusts sandblasted us and the lake raged all the way up to the dunes," he says. Still, he did not worry about his mother.

"I knew she wasn't going to get lost, give up or do anything too dangerous. Most of what I know about safety, caring and having an independent spirit came from her."

Niewenhuis met many people who told her their goal was to walk the Great Lakes. But as far as she knows, she's only American to have walked so far. Only one other person, Canadian Josephine Mandamin, has gone farther — walking around every single Great Lake to raise the alarm about modern destruction of sacred Native American waters.